linduxed's ramblings

Some time ago I wrote a rant about the
sorry state of streaming on Linux. About a month ago I needed to
find an application which would record my desktop for a screencast, giving me
a perfect opportunity to see if the situation had changed somewhat in this
field.

While streaming is still quite bad (video+audio works but there’s still nothing
like OBS), desktop recording is in a better spot
since you only need the raw footage (bells and whistles can be handled
afterwards in a video editor). Although it took some searching, I actually
found something with which I can reliably record my desktop, with microphone
audio.

At times I forget why I loved a certain artist or composition. The same happens
with books, video games and movies. Time has passed and having indulged in the
work of art so many times made me forget what made it so special in the first
place.

Recently my co-worker recommended me an anime series called “Attack on Titan”.
The clips on Youtube looked good; the style was pretty cool, it looked like an
interesting setting and it looked like the focus was on people trying to
survive in a tough world.

Having seen all of the currently released episodes, I can say that all of the
above is true! The style, the setting, the story; all of that is there and is
enjoyable.

The big issue with the series is that all of above mentioned qualities are
wrapped in the shitty package of being an anime.

Macros and expressions are two tools that serve the purpose of saving you from
either repeating a tedious process or the time switching back and forth between
shells to run scripts to manipulate your data with. Both can be (and often are)
used separately, but can be used in tandem to do some pretty cool stuff.

A lot of times when I meet “Vim neophytes” they mention that Vim is a great
editor, but they miss certain features that they find in their previous
editor/IDE of choice. Often this will be a case of them not having learnt the
Vim way of doing the same task, but occasionally you’ll have to tell them that
“Vim doesn’t do that”.
Indeed, these days if you don’t want to hop between different applications (all
of them having the primary purpose of editing text of some kind) you’ll want
features that go beyond “editing text”.

These days an editor can’t just be an editor.

Yesterday, for some unknown reason, Pentadactyl decided that it didn’t want to work any more.
I still have no idea why, and since I’ve been suspending my computer for quite
a few days now, it might actually have to do with me upgrading Firefox from 11
to 12 quite recently. The problem was actually pretty easily solved by
downloading the latest nightly and just fire that up, but before I did that, the
sudden loss of Vim-style navigation inspired me to pick up an old project of
mine:

Every once in a while you stumble on that area of software that Linux just
doesn’t have covered. You might now be thinking that I’d like to talk about
audio and video editing. A fair guess, since you’ll hear people talk about
these two as areas where the other platforms have significantly more
sophisticated software available. But this isn’t what I’m going to talk about.

Being a CS student means that I will be forced to code in a variety of
languages. A lot of our code will be written in Java or C++, but we’ll
necessarily get in touch with many other languages, spanning over multiple
paradigms.

By no means am I a good programmer yet, but the exposure to the different ways
of crafting code has led me to think about what I value (as a novice
programmer) in a language. It’s, after all, my main tool of expression.
Is it the brevity of the code? What the community surrounding the language is
like? Paradigm or strong vs. weak typing? Or could it be that I need the
language to be as “simple” as possible for me to be able to formulate ideas?